Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

For another, Jackson was rich: so rich that he had never worked a single day in his life. So rich that his gallerist had agreed to represent him (or so everyone said, and god, he hoped it was true) as a favor to Jackson’s father. So rich that his shows sold out because, it was rumored, his mother — who had divorced Jackson’s father, a manufacturer of some sort of essential widget of airplane machinery, when Jackson was young and married an inventor of some sort of essential widget of heart transplant surgeries — bought out all his shows and then auctioned the pieces, driving up the prices and then buying them back, inflating Jackson’s sales record. Unlike other rich people he knew — including Malcolm and Richard and Ezra — Jackson only rarely pretended not to be rich. JB had always found the others’ parsimoniousness put-on and irritating, but seeing Jackson once smack down a hundred-dollar bill for two candy bars when they were both high and giggly and starving at three in the morning, telling the cashier to keep the change, had sobered him. There was something obscene about how careless Jackson was with money, something that reminded JB that as much as he thought of himself otherwise, he too was boring, and conventional, and his mother’s son.

For a third, Jackson wasn’t even good-looking. He supposed he was straight — at any rate, there were always girls around, girls whom Jackson treated disdainfully and yet who drifted after him, lint-like, their faces smooth and empty — but he was the least sexy person JB had ever met. Jackson had very pale hair, almost white, and pimple-stippled skin, and teeth that were clearly once expensive-looking but had gone the color of dust and whose gaps were grouted with butter-yellow tartar, the sight of which repulsed JB.

His friends hated Jackson, and as it became clear that Jackson and his own group of friends — lonely rich girls like Hera and sort-of artists like Massimo and alleged art writers like Zane, many of them Jackson’s classmates from the loser day school he’d gone to after failing out of every other private school in New York, including the one that JB had attended — were in his life to stay, they all tried to talk to him about Jackson.

“You’re always going on about what a phony Ezra is,” Willem had said. “But how, exactly, is Jackson any different than Ezra, other than being a total fucking asshole?”

And Jackson was an asshole, and around him, JB was an asshole as well. A few months ago, the fourth or fifth time he’d tried to stop doing drugs, he had called Jude one day. It was five in the afternoon, and he’d just woken up, and he felt so awful, so incredibly old and exhausted and just done —his skin slimy, his teeth furry, his eyes dry as wood — that he had wanted, for the first time, to be dead, to simply not have to keep going on and on and on. Something has to change , he told himself. I have to stop hanging around with Jackson. I have to stop. Everything has to stop . He missed his friends, he missed how innocent and clean they were, he missed being the most interesting among them, he missed never having to try around them.

So he had called Jude (naturally, Willem wasn’t fucking in town, and Malcolm couldn’t be trusted not to freak out) and asked him, begged him, to come over after work. He told him where, exactly, the rest of the crystal was (under the loose half-plank of wood under the right side of the bed), and where his pipe was, and asked him to flush it down the toilet, to get rid of it all.

“JB,” Jude had said. “Listen to me. Go to that café on Clinton, okay? Take your sketch pad. Get yourself something to eat. I’m coming down as soon as I can, as soon as this meeting’s over. And then I’ll text you when I’m done and you can come home, all right?”

“Okay,” he’d said. And he’d stood up, and taken a very long shower, hardly scrubbing himself, just standing under the water, and then had done exactly what Jude had instructed: He picked up his sketch pad and pencils. He went to the café. He ate some of a chicken club sandwich and drank some coffee. And he waited.

And while he was waiting, he saw, passing the window like a bipedal mongoose, with his dirty hair and delicate chin, Jackson. He watched Jackson walk by, his self-satisfied, rich-boy lope, that pleased half smile on his face that made JB want to hit him, as detached as if Jackson was just someone ugly he saw on the street, not someone ugly he saw almost every day. And then, just before he passed out of sight, Jackson turned, and looked in the window, directly at him, and smiled his ugly smile, and reversed direction and walked back toward the café and through the door, as if he had known all along that JB was there, as if he had materialized only to remind JB that JB was his now, that there would be no escaping from him, that JB was there to do what Jackson wanted him to do when Jackson wanted him to do it, and that his life would never be his own again. For the first time, he had been scared of Jackson, and panicked. What has happened? he wondered. He was Jean-Baptiste Marion, he made the plans, people followed him , not the other way around. Jackson would never let him go, he realized, and he was frightened. He was someone else’s; he was owned now. How would he ever become un-owned? How could he ever return to who he was?

“ ’Sup,” said Jackson, unsurprised to see him, as unsurprised as if he had willed JB into being.

What could he say? “ ’Sup,” he said.

Then his phone rang: Jude, telling him that all was safe, and he could come back. “I’ve got to go,” he said, standing, and as he left, Jackson followed him.

He watched Jude’s expression change as he saw Jackson by his side. “JB,” he said, calmly, “I’m glad to see you. Are you ready to go?”

“Go where?” he asked, stupidly.

“Back to my place,” said Jude. “You said you’d help me reach that box I can’t get?”

But he was so confused, still so muddled, that he hadn’t understood. “What box?”

“The box on the closet shelf that I can’t reach,” Jude said, still ignoring Jackson. “I need your help; it’s too difficult for me to climb the ladder on my own.”

He should’ve known, then; Jude never made references to what he couldn’t do. He was offering him a way out, and he was too stupid to recognize it.

But Jackson did. “I think your friend wants to get you away from me,” he told JB, smirking. That was what Jackson always called them, even though he had met them all before: Your friends. JB’s friends .

Jude looked at him. “You’re right,” he said, still in that calm, steady voice. “I do.” And then, turning back to him, “JB — won’t you come with me?”

Oh, he wanted to. But in that moment, he couldn’t. He wouldn’t know why, not ever, but he couldn’t. He was powerless, so powerless that he couldn’t even pretend otherwise. “I can’t,” he whispered to Jude.

“JB,” said Jude, and took his arm and pulled him toward the curb, as Jackson watched them with his stupid, mocking smile. “Come with me. You don’t have to stay here. Come with me, JB.”

He had started crying then, not loudly, not steadily, but crying nonetheless. “JB,” Jude said again, his voice low. “Come with me. You don’t have to go back there.”

But “I can’t,” he heard himself saying. “I can’t. I want to go upstairs. I want to go home.”

“Then I’ll come in with you.”

“No. No, Jude. I want to be alone. Thank you. But go home.”

“JB,” Jude began, but he turned from him and ran, jamming the key into the front door and running up the stairs, knowing Jude wouldn’t be capable of following him, but with Jackson right behind him, laughing his mean laugh, while Jude’s calls—“JB! JB!”—trailed after him, until he was inside his apartment (Jude had cleaned while he was here: the sink was empty; the dishes were stacked in the rack, drying) and couldn’t hear him any longer. He turned off his phone, on which Jude was calling him, and muted the front-door buzzer’s intercom, on which Jude was ringing and ringing him.